The Death of the Death of the Subject by Peter Hudis

7/29/2019 The Death of the Death of the Subject by Peter Hudis

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Historical Materialism, volume 12:3 (147168)

Peter Hudis

The Death of the Death of the Subject

The conversion of the subject into the predicate,

and the predicate into the subject, the exchange

of that which is determined for that which is

determined is always the most immediate

revolution.1

The movement born from the protest against the

World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999 has

placed new importance on reconstituting a Marxian

critique of oppression and alienation that goes

beyond targeting the personifications of capital. The

way in which tens of thousands of workers, students,

feminists, gays and lesbians, environmentalists, and

Third World activists came together in Seattle and

at other protests since then reflects new opposition

to capitals incessant drive for self-expansion and

universality. This is not to say that everyone in this

emerging movement has reached a level of self-

understanding adequate to the implications posed

by the protests. Many still define the problem as one

that hinges on corporate greed, private ownership,

or the lack of democratic control of multinationals

by the nation-state. That the problem lies deeper, in

1 Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Vierte Abteilung, Band 2. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1981.
http://www.brill.nl/


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148 Peter Hudis

2 Postone, p. 17.

the very nature of capital as a social relation, is by no means self-evident. Yet

the depth and breadth of the protests unleashed by Seattle indicates that a

movement has emerged with the potential to challenge capitals very existence

as the prevailing form of social mediation.Given this situation, a work that, firstly, targets capital as an abstract form

of domination rooted in value-creating labour; that, secondly, criticises those

who focus instead on private property, unequal forms of distribution, and

the anarchy of the market; and that, finally, presents Marxs work as a critique

of value-producing labour rather than as a call to realise it through planning,

such a book, should have much to say to today. Yet Postones Time, Labor and

Social Domination is not simply an effort to subject Traditional Marxists tocritique for mistaking the object of Marxs critique value-creating labour

for the principle of the new society. Nor does its originality lie in an effort to

rescue Marxs work from such distortions (others achieved that quite some

time ago). Rather, its distinctive feature is the effort to ground a critique of

Traditional Marxism in the claim that the logic of Marxs work shows that

the working class is integral to capitalism rather than the embodiment of its

negation.2

Since this claim grounds Postones overall approach and argument,I will subject it to critical investigation by exploring: firstly, his critique of

traditional Marxism; secondly, his effort to subsume the worker as subject

in Marxs Capital; and finally, his overall view of the Hegel-Marx relation.

The role of the subject in Traditional Marxism

Postone centres his critique of traditional Marxism on its advocacy of ametaphysics of labor, that is, it attacks capitalism from the standpoint of

labour instead of developing a critique of the very nature of labour in

capitalism. Labour is not, Postone rightly insists, the source of all material

wealth; it is the source of all value. Labour takes on this role only in capitalism,

where it has a dual character, as expressed in the split between concrete and

abstract labour. Through the existence of abstract labour, labour becomes a

socially-mediating activity which dominates all social relations. Abstract labour

is the substance of value and hence capital. Instead of criticising the historical

specificity of value-creating labour, Traditional Marxism conflates labour

and value-creating labour and posits the latter affirmatively.


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The Death of the Death of the Subject 149

3 Postone 1993, p. 65.4 Postone, p. 82.

As a result, the nature of value-creating labour ceases to be the object of

critique. Postone writes,

[w]hen labor is the standpoint of the critique, the historical level of the

development of production is taken to determine the relative adequacy of

those existing relations, which are interpreted in terms of the existing mode

of distribution. Industrial production is not the object of the historical critique,

but is posited as the progressive social dimension that, increasingly, fettered

by private property and the market, will serve as the basis of socialist society.3

Such a standpoint can neither account for the failure of Soviet-type societies

to avoid the social problems characteristic of traditional capitalism nor explain

their evolution towards free-market systems. By mistaking the object of

Marxs critique (value-creating labour) for the principle of a new society,

Traditional Marxism finds itself unable to explain the growing structural

similarity between private capitalism and the state capitalism which called

itself Communism. The matter is of extreme importance. As long as Marxism

remains identified with the social formations which ruled in Marxs name,

and so long as Marxist analyses fail to provide a convincing explanation of

their development and collapse, it is extremely unlikely that large numbers

of people will find Marxian ideas important enough to be re-examined in

their own right.

Postones effort to distinguish between a standpoint that proceeds from

labour (understood as value-creating labour) and one that proceeds from

the standpoint of the critique of that labour is of crucial importance in any

effort to reconstitute a genuine Marxian analysis. However, Postone burdens

his analysis with the argument that, by viewing the proletariat as the subject

of revolution, traditional Marxism tends to conflate labour with value-

creating labour. He writes,

[a]ny theory that posits the proletariat or the species as Subject implies that

the activity constituting the Subject is to be fulfilled rather than overcome.

Hence, the activity itself cannot be seen as alienated.4

Clearly, for Postone, there is no real difference between the workers and the

mode of labour in which they are employed. To affirmatively promote the

one is to affirmatively promote the other. What he calls Ricardian Marxism


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150 Peter Hudis

5 Hegel 1979, pp. 24738.

the tendency to focus on the difference between the value of labour-power

and the value of the total product rather than on the peculiar social character

of value-producing labour is seen by him as integral to viewing the proletariat

as subject.This view is very problematic. He is, of course, right that Marx did not

simply take over Ricardos labour theory of value. Marx showed that, while

Ricardo analysed the magnitude of value, he left unexamined the kind of

labour which creates value, as if it were simply a natural property of labour.

In contrast, Marx considered the distinction between concrete labour (which

creates use-values) and abstract labour (which creates value) as his original

contribution. But the question is: why did Ricardo not conceptualise the kindof labour which creates value? What stopped him from grasping the historical

specificity of value-creating labour? The answer is that his theoretical categories

did not extend to the subjectivity of the labourer. Ricardo ended replacing

the labourer for labour and looked at the labourer as a thing, as a commodity:

even though Ricardo sensed the discrepancy between the value of labour-

power and that of the total product, he never inquired into the difference

between labour as commodity and labour as activity. Ricardo viewed value-creating labour transhistorically by not taking account of the subjectivity of

labourers.

Marxs critique of Hegel reveals a similar phenomenon. Hegel was surely

aware of value-creating labour, writing in his First Philosophy of Spirit, [t]he

more mechanised labour becomes, the less value it has, and the more the

individual must toil. . . . [T]he value of labour decreases as much as the

productivity of labour increases.5

Hegel even defined labour as absolutenegativity. As Marx saw it, Hegel stood on the basis of political economy.

To Hegel, humanitys process of objectifying itself through the process of

labour is a process of alienation and, therefore, the transcendence of alienation

implies the transcendence of objectivity. This indicates that Hegel posed value-

producing labour transhistorically. The question is: why did he pose labour

transhistorically? Why did he stand on the basis of political economy? The

answer is that the subjectivity of the labourer was out of reach for him. Byfocusing on labour, but not on the subjectivity of the labourer who performs

that labour, Hegel failed to identify the negative element with a corporeal

subject; the Subject remained self-consciousness (what Marx called the lie

of his principle). Thus, whereas Ricardo acted as if the labourer were the


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commodity, instead of labour-power, Hegel acted as if the generative force

creating value were labour, instead of a particular kind of labour. For both,

labour was viewed transhistorically precisely because they kept their distance

from the workers individual subjectivity.The situation may appear different when we come to Marxism, for, unlike

Ricardo and Hegel, Traditional Marxists did conceive of the proletariat

as a subject of revolution, but, of course, this appearance is deceptive.

Postone does a fine job attacking the tendency in many Marxists Maurice

Dobb, Ronald Meek, Helmut Reichelt, Paul Sweezy, et al. to view value-

creating labour as that which comes into its own under socialism once the

fetters of private property are overcome. He does a much poorer jobdemonstrating a necessary connection between their position and viewing

workers as subject. Most of these Traditional Marxists actually placed little

emphasis on the subjective dimension of proletarian struggle. It could even

be argued that they viewed workers mainly as objects. How else can one

explain why so many of them adopted a largely uncritical attitude toward

actually existing socialism, even when those rgimes were pursuing policies

of forced labour and totalitarian social control over the workplace? Theproletariat may often enough have been heralded as force, as an objective

factor that could bring down capitalism, but that did not mean the actual

subjectivity of the labourer, its reason, reclaimed the attention of much

Traditional Marxism especially insofar as it impinged on its struggles for

a different kind of labour.

One figure who may seem to have been caught red-handed, as far as the

connection between transhistorical views of labour and that of worker assubject is concerned, is Georg Lukcs. Lukcs, as Postone notes, went as far

as to equate proletarian class consciousness with Hegels identical subject-

object. He, clearly, was also trapped in a transhistorical concept of labour, as

seen in his contention that, instead of being specific to capitalism, socially

necessary labour time operates under socialism as well. Yet Postones

contention that this limitation in Lukcs flows from an endorsement of the

concept of worker as subject does not hold up to close scrutiny. DespiteLukcss over-emphasis on proletarian consciousness as representing the

Hegelian identity of subject-object, or perhaps because of it, he ended up

subsuming proletarian subjectivity. The problem that Lukcs confronted in

his theory of class consciousness was how to explain the apparent gap between

present-day workers consciousness and the goal of a future socialist society

if the workers consciousness is identical to Hegels subject-object. Lukcs


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152 Peter Hudis

6 Marcuse 1960, p. xiv.

tried to answer this by developing his famous theory of reification. In essence,

this held that capitalism reproduces itself not only through the transformation

of labour-power into a commodity, but also through the commodification of

thought. By applying the notion of reification of thought to the entirety ofsociety, Lukcs sought to explain the apparent gap between present-day

proletarian consciousness and the idea of a socialist society. Yet this opened

up an even more seemingly insoluble dilemma. For, if even our thought is

reified, how are we to free ourselves? Lukcss answer is that the party would

free us, by serving as the cunning of the proletariat. Lukcss posing of an

immediate identity between proletarian consciousness and Hegels identical

subject-object drove him to pose the party as the form of mediation neededto overcome the gap between is and ought. It would, therefore, be more

correct to say that the real subject for Lukcs was not the proletariat but the

party. This has ramifications that extend far beyond his position, since a great

many Marxists after Marx were rooted in the fetish of the party.

Postone acknowledges that Lukcss theory of reification served as the

ground for theories of one-dimensionality in the Frankfurt school. While his

critique of the Frankfurt school is of interest, it hardly supports his claim thatthere is a necessary connection between posing workers as subject and having

a transhistorical view of labour. Pollocks and Horkheimers projection of

transhistorical concepts of labour coincided with an explicit rejection of the

proletariat as subject. A different position was suggested by the early work

of Herbert Marcuse (to whom Postone refers to only in passing). In 1941,

Marcuse affirmed the integrality of proletarian subjectivity and Hegels dialectic

in his Reason and Revolution. He argued that the key to Hegel, and his bridgeto Marx, is found in Hegels notion of Reason as Subject of History. This

notion, Marcuse argued, is critically appropriated by Marx in his projection

of the proletariat as subject of revolution. The proletariat as the realisation

of philosophy represents to Marx the embodiment of Hegelian rationality in

the realm of social reality. In 1960, however, Marcuse published a new preface

to Reason and Revolution which pointed to a decisive shift in his conception

of the Hegel-Marx relation. Marcuse argued that, because those social groups,which dialectic theory identified as the forces of negation, are either defeated

or reconciled with the system, the subject itself is apparently a constitutive

part of the object . . ..6 For reality has become technological reality, and the

subject is now joined with the object so closely that the notion of object


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7 Marcuse 1960, p. xii.

necessarily includes the subject.7 On this basis, he concluded, the notion of

Reason itself is the undialectical element in Hegels philosophy. This is the

unstated basis of Postones position that proletarian subjectivity has become

so integrated into the objective structure of capital that any affirmation of itssubjectivity ineluctably assumes the naturalness of value-creating labour.

Postones contention that transhistorical views of labour are tied to viewing

workers as subjects becomes especially problematic in light of tendencies

which he does not consider, such as the humanist interpretation of Marx.

Long before Postone, Marxist humanists singled out the historical specificity

of value-creating labour and projected it as the distinct stamp of bourgeois

society. They also attacked the tendency among Traditional Marxists to poseprivate property, the market, and forms of distribution as the pons asini of a

postcapitalist society. Marxist humanists undertook a rigorous analysis of

Soviet-type societies as state-capitalist on the basis of the theoretical categories

in Marxs Capital. All of this was achieved through an intense focus on the

centrality of proletarian struggles for a new kind of labour at the point of

production. The critique of the historical specificity of value-creating labour

and the projection of the proletariat as subject of revolt was neither a theoreticalinconsistency nor a matter of opposed determinations lying side by side. The

critique of value-producing labour was achieved by affirming proletarian

subjectivity.

As Raya Dunayevskaya wrote in Marxism and Freedom, back in 1958,

So hostile was Marx to labor under capitalism, that at first he called, not

for the emancipation of labor, but for its abolition. That is why, at first,

he termed mans function not labor, but self-activity. When he changed

the expression abolition of labor to emancipation of labor, it was only

because the working class showed in its revolts how it can through alienated

labor achieve emancipation. Marxism is wrongly considered to be a new

political economy. In truth, it is a critique of the very foundations of political

economy. . . . What Marx did that was new was to [show] what type of labor

creates value and hence surplus value, and the process by which this was

done. What kept others from seeing it, is that they had kept a goodly distance

from the factory. They remained in the marketplace, in the sphere of

circulation. . . . Marxs primary theory is a theory of what he first called

alienated labor and then abstract or value-producing labor. . . . Hence,


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154 Peter Hudis

8 Dunayevskaya 2000, pp. 61, 106, 138.9 Postone 1993, p. 73.10 Appadurai 1978, p. 124.

it is more correct to call the Marxist theory of capital not a labor theory of

value but a value theory of labor.8

Postone takes no notice of the humanist interpretation of Marxs theory of

value. One can argue that he need not do so, since he makes no claim topresent a comprehensive discussion of the Marxian tradition. However, the

presence of the humanist interpretation of Marxs value theory poses an

important conceptual problem for Postones position. If it is true, as he

repeatedly argues, that any theory that posits the proletariat or the species

as subject implies that the activity constituting the subject is to be fulfilled

rather than overcome, then it follows that theories based on class struggle

and proletarian subjectivity must, of necessity, display an uncritical attitudetoward labour and an emphasis on the realm of distribution and private

property as the determinants in overcoming capitalism. The existence of even

a single body of thought which affirms proletarian subjectivity and class

struggle without implying these characteristics of Traditional Marxism calls

into question Postones central premise, namely, [T]he idea that the proletariat

embodies a possible post-capitalist form of social life only makes sense, if

capitalism is defined essentially in terms of private ownership of the meansof production.9

This is not to deny that many have fallen into a transhistorical concept of

labour, with all the deleterious characteristics cited by Postone, by holding

to a certain notion of class struggle. As Arjun Appadurai said of anarcho-

syndicalism:

The syndicalists accept the general socialist position that society is divided

into two classes, the capitalist and the proletariat, whose claims are

irreconcilable; that the modern state is a class state dominated by the few

capitalists; that the institution of private capital is the root of all social evils

and that the only remedy for them is to substitute collective capital in place

of private capital.10

Clearly, in this conception, the class struggle involves, not the negation of

the value-form of mediation, but, rather, its realisation through the creationof collective capital. But it is not the concept of class struggle that is at issue

here as much as a limited and narrow interpretation of it. The anarcho-


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11 Postone 1993, p. 224.12 Marx 1975, p. 295.

syndicalist concept of class struggle as articulated by Appadurai is very far

from the Marxian notion of class struggle. For Marx, the struggle of the

proletariat does not simply involve a struggle over the distribution of value.

It involves a struggle over the very existence of value.By entering the factory, conceptually speaking, instead of just discussing

labour as a general social characteristic, Marx discerned a silent civil war

at the point of production, hinging on the alienation inherent in the very

activity of labouring. What is alienated at the point of production is neither

a pre-existing substance nor an abstract essence. What is alienated from me

at the point of production is my capacity for conscious, purposeful activity.

I am reduced to a cog in the machine, and I resist that. I become chained tothe drive of capital for self-expansion. Human relations take on the form of

relations between things because that is what they really are. My dissatisfaction

with that situation, the resistance which I put up to it, is the one thing I can

do to prove I am not totally absorbed into the object. I want freedom, not to

revert to some pre-existing essence, but to learn how to appropriate the many

social developments formed on the basis of my alienated activity. Yes,

overcoming alienation, in other words, entails the historical Subjectsrealization of itself,11 the realisation of my human capacities to be free, to be

a subject, to be self-directed, rather than to be a mere means for the self-

expansion of value. This does not imply that I want to posit my labour as

the principle of a new society. On the contrary, I want to get rid of it altogether.

I want to be what I can become, a conscious, purposeful being at work, but

by no means limited to work. I want it to determine all my human relationships,

be it in working or loving, studying or playing. I demand that on the basisof who I am as a conscious, purposeful, human being.

This, it seems to me, is the focal point of class struggle in the Marxian

concept. It has often been passed over. The problem goes back to the formation

of Marxism as an organised movement. Despite their voluble rhetoric about

class struggle, the Marxists of the Second International based their outlook

on the contrast between the anarchy of the market and centralised planning.

They paid scant attention to Marxs point, articulated in his critique ofProudhon, that, if the order of the factory were extended to the whole of

society, there would be complete totalitarianism.12 Like the classical political

economists, they treated the subjectivity of the worker as of little or no account,


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156 Peter Hudis

13 Postone 1993, p. 276.14 For my critique of Postones reliance on the Grundrisse, which colours much of

his discussion ofCapital, see Hudis 1995.

transforming the dialectics of revolution into immutable objective laws of

history. By the time the Russian Revolution fell under the sway of Stalin,

this iron-clad objectivism took on a new lease on life. The contrast of the

anarchy of the market and centralised planning became a veritable fetish.The disregard of the subjectivity of the labourer became reflected not just in

the reproduction of the worst features of alienated labour, but in the overarching

fetish that The Party represents the knowing of the proletariat. The move

away from a dialectic of human subjectivity became the defining feature of

post-Marx Marxism, taking in even those who fought Stalinism on a political

level, such as Trotsky.

Far from placing too much emphasis on proletarian subjectivity, the problemof post-Marx Marxism, it seems to me, is that has undertheorised it. If Marxists

had not so downplayed the subjective dimension, they would have been able

to see that, while the class struggle initially focuses on the proceeds of labour,

it ultimately centres on the very kind of labour the worker is forced to perform.

Grasping that would also have placed Marxists in a better position to

conceptualise the relation between class struggles and struggles against reified

human relations by other social forces, such as women, youth and nationalminorities. Though Postone thinks his view that the proletariat is an object

and appendage of capital posits a critique of Traditional Marxism,13 we

would have to conclude, on the contrary, that it reproduces some of the worst

features of it.

The presence of the subject in Marxs Capital

Any effort to properly evaluate Postones book needs to address his

interpretation of Marxs mature theory, since that is its focus. Though it is

not possible to provide a full treatment of this here, I will single out some

aspects of Marxs Capital which raise grounds for a very different interpretation

from that offered by Postone.14

First, Postone is correct to criticise those who view value-creating labour

transhistorically. But his critique of transhistorical concepts of labour is

somewhat confusing, because the mature Marx did have a transhistorical

view of labour, though it was not the same as that which Postone criticises


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15 Marx 1977, p. 290.16 Postone 1993, p. 325.

in Traditional Marxism. Marx discussed this in Capital: labour is the universal

condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the ever-

lasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore

independent of every form of that existence, or rather is common to all formsof society in which human beings live.15

Though Postone indirectly refers to this passage several times, he never

quotes it. If he had, it would be clear to the reader that there are two different,

opposed senses in which labour is transhistorical. One is the sense in which

Marx discussed it above, where labour is the ever-lasting nature-imposed

condition of human existence. The other is the false hypostatisation of value-

creating labour as transhistorical, which is quite different from the above.By failing to clearly pose the relation between these two, distinct senses in

which labour is transhistorical, Postone counterposes Marxs Economic-

Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital. Postone alleges the former suffered

from a transhistorical concept of labour along the lines of Traditional

Marxism. It is true that, in 1844, Marx had not yet created his concept of the

two-fold nature of labour. In some places, he used the word labour to refer

to labour as conscious, purposeful activity, while, in other places, he usedthe same word to refer to alienated, value-producing labour. It is also true

that, in 1844, Marx sometimes speaks of labour as that which has existed

throughout human history. But that does not mean that he projects a

transhistorical concept of value-producing labour. Rather, the 1844Manuscripts

contain the same transhistorical concept of labour as found in Capital.

More is at issue here than a mere external relation between texts. A proper

understanding of the two, distinct senses of labour as transhistorical is crucialfor an adequate understanding of the relation between the labour process

and the valorisation process. Postone writes, [A]s capitalism develops, however,

the labor process comes to be intrinsically determined by the process of

valorization.16 This is true. However, it would be wrong to conclude that

the labour process is essentially annulled by or completely absorbed into

the valorisation process. Even when the proportion of direct human relation

at the point of production falls considerably, capital still confronts thetranshistorical presence of labour. It cannot be repeated often enough that

Marxs entire analysis of the value-form of mediation characteristic of capitalism

rests on his view that what the labourers sell is not their labour, but only


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158 Peter Hudis

17 Marx 1977, p. 290.18 Marx 1977, p. 165.

their capacity to labour, their labour-power. Marxs split in the category of

labour between labour as activity vs. labour-power as commodity not only

serves to explain the inherent duality of use-value vs. exchange-value which

inheres in every commodity; it also points to the inherent tension betweenthe drive for reification and the irreducible subjectivity of that which is not

a thing, the human being. In other words, reification can never be total,

because, if it were, capital would exhaust its supply of living labour and have

no source of value left with which to reproduce the value of its accumulated

capital. The inability of capital to completely reify the subject flows not from

social and political aspects extraneous to the capital-relation, but from its very

foundation. The split in the category of labour suggests that reification mustbe conceptualised in relation to the realm of resistance which resides within

the capital-relation itself. It is often said that totalitarian political structures

conceal tremendous tensions and contradictions at their base; I would argue

that the same is true of capital, the most totalitarian economic formation ever

known to humanity.

Marx did not subject capital to critique from the standpoint of labour. He

criticised it from the standpoint of the labourer. This enabled him to breakfrom any notion that value-creating labour is natural and transhistorical,

because it brought him face to face with the subjectivity of the labourer who

resists the alienation inherent in her very activity of labouring under capitalism.

The difference between a standpoint that proceeds transhistorically from

labour (that is, value-creating labour) and a standpoint that proceeds from

the labourer is of decisive importance in grasping the dialectical structure

and content of Marxs Capital.We can see this from the most abstract level of Marxs Capital and the

discussion of commodity fetishism in its first chapter. With commodity

fetishism, the value-form of a product of labour assumes a ghostly character,

starts to dance on its own initiative and becomes an autonomous figure

endowed with a life of its own.17 We have reached the realm of the non-

sensuous sensuous. This is no mere realm of illusion; mere demystification

cannot debunk this topsy-turvy world in which human relations take on theform of relations between things, because that is the way they really are.18

It is hard to imagine a more total subsumption of human subjectivity by the

dictates of the value-form. And yet it is here, at this most abstract level, that


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19 Marx 1977, p. 173.20 Ibid.

Marx posed the self-activity of the human subject as pivotal. Since the fetish

is all-pervasive, the very Geist of capital, no amount of enlightened critique

can strip away the fetish. The only thing which can is a form of praxis

which combines practical action with the subjectivity of purpose: [T]heveil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e., the

process of material production, until it becomes production by freely

associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control.19 The

human subject does not get washed out in Marxs tracing out of the logic of

abstract labour and commodity fetishism. Instead, the absolute epitome of

alienation (commodity fetishism) is counterposed to an absolutely opposed

form of human praxis, the struggle for a new kind of labour by freelyassociated men.

It is not just the phrase, freely associated men which is proof of the presence

of human subjectivity in Chapter One. The development of the very content

of the section on commodity fetishism is proof of it. Remarkably, there was

no section on commodity fetishism in the 1867 (first) edition of Volume I of

Capital. It was only between 1872 and 1875, in revising Capital for the French

edition, that Marx created a section entitled The Fetishism of the Commodityand Its Secret. Marx introduced crucial changes to his discussion of commodity

fetishism in the French edition, which he said had a scientific value independent

of the original. One of the most important changes concerned his effort to

answer the question of whence arises the enigmatic character of the product

of labour, once it assumes the form of a commodity.20 It is only with the

French edition that Marx answered this to his satisfaction, by stating, Clearly,

from this form itself. With this change, Marx makes it clear that what explainsthe mystery of the fetish is the very form assumed by the product of labour,

the very nature of the peculiar social character of the labour which produces

commodities. This new formulation, as well as the new section on commodity

fetishism as a whole, explicitly posed the abolition of fetishism as centring

on the abolition of value-producing labour.

What intervened between the first German edition in 1867 and the French

edition of 18725 which explains Marxs reworking of the section oncommodity fetishism? The Paris Commune. The changes introduced into the

French edition reflected its impact. As Dunayevskaya wrote in Marxism and

Freedom,


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160 Peter Hudis

21 Dunayevskaya 2000, p. 98.22 Marx 1977, p. 169.23 Postone 1993, p. 368.

The totality of the reorganization of society by the Communards shed new

insight into the perversity of relations under capitalism. . . . This was so

clearly the absolute opposite of the dialectic movement of labor under

capitalism, forced into a value-form, that all fetishisms were stripped off ofcapitalist production.21

The activity of the Communards thereby allowed for a new leap in thought.

Commodity fetishism cannot be penetrated by enlightened critique which

assumes a privileged standpoint outside the value-form; nor can it be stripped

away by pointing to a hidden essence obscured by the illusion of fetishism.

Instead,

The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that

surround the products of labour on the basis of commodity production,

vanishes as soon as we come to other forms of production.22

The emergence a new form of association pointing to a transcendence of the

value-form in 1871 provided the vantage point for penetrating the secret of

the fetish. Marxs reworking of the section on commodity fetishism after the

Paris Commune reveals the impact of workers revolts on the creation of hiscentral value-theoretical categories.

As Postone sees it, workers revolts never point beyond capital but are

always, of necessity, implicated in it. Yet how can this can so in light of the

development of the value-theoretical categories in Capital? Marxs reworking

ofCapital under the impact of workers struggles such as the battle against

slavery in the American Civil War, the fight for the eight-hour working day,

and the Paris Commune poses the sharpest of challenges to Postones claimthat

The universality represented by the proletariat ultimately is that of value . . .

far from representing the negation of value, the proletariat essentially

constitutes this abstract, homogeneous form of wealth.23

In a word, although Postone accepts the conclusions that flowed from the

impact of workers struggles on Marxs thought (such as Marxs contention

that the value-form of mediation instead of property forms, market relations,

and forms of distributions must be the main object of critique) he does so by


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24 Marx 1977, p. 477.25 Postone 1993, p. 328.26 Postone 1993, p. 336.27 Marx 1977, p. 255.

separating such conclusions from the process, the way in which Marxs

concepts took shape through an active dialectic between theory and practice.

The result in a one-sided reading which fails to do justice to Marxs

delineation of the dialectic of capital. Whereas Marx presented the strugglesto shorten the working day as in advance of the declaration of the inalienable

rights of man, Postone sees them as simply spurring capital to create new

labour-saving devices. Whereas Marx said, [w]hen the worker co-operates

in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality,

and develops the capabilities of his species,24 Postone says that co-operation

simply means workers are subsumed under, and incorporated into capital:

they become a particular mode of its existence.25

Whereas Marx called strugglesagainst machinofacture revolts against this particular form of the means of

production as being the material basis of the capitalist mode of production,

Postone says [a]t this stage of Marxs exposition, the capitalist process of

production does not yet embody of possibility of its own negation.26 And,

whereas Marx spoke of how the revolt of the working class bursts asunder

the capitalist integument, Postone does not even bother discussing the crucial

last parts of Capital in which this appears, on the absolute general law ofcapitalist accumulation. His argument that the logical thrust of Marxs

presentation does not support the idea that workers struggles embody the

negation of capital separates what Marx joined together: an analysis of abstract

forms of domination and a view that never takes its fingers off the pulse of

human relations.

Hegels dialectic: logic of capital or dialectic of transcendence?

This does not mean that Postone rejects the determinative importance of

subjectivity. To Postone, the self-moving subject is not the worker, but capital.

He centres his argument on the chapter The General Formula of Capital,

where Marx writes of capital as an automatic subject, says value is here the

subject, and calls value the dominant subject of this process . . ..27

Though it may appear that Postone has supplied textual evidence to support

his claim that the logic of Marxs analysis presents capital as the subject, the


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162 Peter Hudis

28 See Marx 1989, p. 124, for the way in which he revised the French edition ofChapter 4 in terms of the question of capital as subject. See also Anderson 1993.

appearance is, once again, deceptive. It is above all crucial to keep in mind

the context of this section of Volume I. In The General Formula of Capital,

Marx was discussing the process of circulation, as embodied in the movement

from money to commodity to more money (M-C-M). This movement creates,of necessity, the appearance that value has the occult ability to add value to

itself. However, Marx later shows that this appearance is dispelled once we

enter the labour process and encounters capitals dependence on the living

labourers. As Marx showed in the ensuing chapter Contradictions in the

General Formula, value appears to self-expand on its own account so long

as we restrict ourselves to the process of circulation. When we move to the

labour process, however, we find that the appearance of value as self-movingsubject encounters internal limits, flowing from the dual character of labour.

Which is why Marx did not use the phrase value as subject when he moved

into the analysis of the production process of capital.

By conflating Marxs discussion of value as an automatic subject at a

specific point in the analysis of capitalist circulation with value as the absolute

subject in Marxs analysis of capitalism as a whole, Postone contravenes his

own argument against elevating the sphere of distribution above that ofrelations of production.

The development of Marxs Capital further undermines Postones claim

that Marx simply posed capital or dead labour as the subject. Marx did not

only revise the first chapter ofCapital when he issued the French edition of

Capital in 18725. He also revised Chapter Four, on The General Formula of

Capital. In the French edition, Marx removed all three references to capital

and value as subject. As we noted earlier, the French edition was writtenunder the impact of the new stage of workers revolt reached with the Paris

Commune. Unfortunately, we have yet to have an English-language edition

of Capital that conveys all of the changes introduced by Marx into French

edition.28

Postones argument that capital is the subject derives not just from his

reading ofCapitalbut from his interpretation of Hegel. As he sees it, Hegels

concept of the Absolute Subject bears a striking similarity to the Marxiannotion of capital, in that it represents a self-moving substance which grounds

itself. Hegels Absolute, as a self-referential entity, expresses, in his view, the

logic of capital as self-expanding value.


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29 See Hudis 1995.30 Hegel 1929, p. 466.31 Hegel 1929, p. 485.32 Marx 1975, p. 341.

Elsewhere, I have raised a number of objections to Postones reading of

Hegel.29 I would add here that, even if one were to grant Postones argument

that Hegels Logic represents the logic of capital, it does not necessarily follow

that Hegels philosophy simply expresses the value-form. Capital, as Marxanalysed it; is an inherently two-dimensional category, riven by an absolute

contradiction between the drive to increase material productivity, on the one

hand, and the drive to augment surplus-value, on the other. The former

compels capital to constantly reduce the proportion of living labour at the

point of production, while the latter makes capital dependent on such labour

for its reproduction. The logic of capital presents us with a system imbued

with such internal instability that capital intimates a realm beyond capital,wherein human power is its own end. Likewise, Hegels Logic is traversed

by an internal duality: the absolute contradiction between the Theoretical and

Practical Idea. The Absolute, Hegel says, contains the highest contradiction

within itself.30 His tracing out of the logic of the concept does not lead to a

space of restful abode in which all contradictions are annulled. On the contrary,

the chapter on The Absolute Idea in the Science of Logic ends by intimating

a new sphere which follows Logic, the realm of Spirit. Hegel says of thisnew sphere: [t]he pure Idea, in which the determinateness or reality of the

Notion is itself raised to the level of Notion, is an absolute liberation.31 As

Marx wrote in 1844, despite Hegels estranged insight, and despite the fact

that he stands on the basis of political economy, the self-drive of his dialectic

is such that it points to the transcendence of alienation in a new society:

[T]he positive moments of the Hegelian dialectic [are]. . . . Transcendence

as objective movement, withdrawing externalisation into itself. This is the

insight . . . of the appropriation of objective essence through the transcendence

of its alienation . . . the actual appropriation of his objective essence through

the destruction of the alienated determinations of the objective world . . .32

The clearest expression of Marxs view that Hegels categories express not

only the logic of capital but also a dialectic of liberation is contained in his

use of the negation of the negation. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx directly

appropriated this Hegelian category, writing: Communism is the position as


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164 Peter Hudis

33 Marx 1975, p. 306.34 Marx 1977, p. 292.35 For more on the crucial movement from Hegels Science of Logic to his Philosophy

of Spirit, and its implication for contemporary freedom struggles, see Dunayevskaya1989a and 1989b.

36 Postone 1993, p. 150.37 Postone 1993, p. 154.

the negation of the negation.33 In Capital, he returned to it anew in writing,

capitalist production process begets, with the inexorability of a natural process,

its own negation. This is the negation of the negation.34 Though it has become

fashionable in some quarters to view Hegels dialectic as nothing but theexpression of the logic of capital, that was neither what Marx concluded from

his critique of Hegel nor, I argue, should we in light of the need to ground

emancipatory struggles in a philosophy of liberation.35

Postone, on the other hand, sees Hegels dialectic as completely confined

within the value-form of mediation. This is clear from his very use of the

word mediation, a key Hegelian category. Postone seems to view any socially

mediating activity as necessarily alienating. He writes, The function of laboras a socially mediating activity is what Marx terms abstract labor.36 It is true

that abstract labour is a socially mediating activity. It is also true that Value

is a category of mediation.37 But is every mediation a category of value? Does

labour become abstract labour by serving as a socially mediating activity?

Marx spoke of labour as the universal condition for the metabolic interaction

between man and nature. A metabolic interaction implies some sort of

mediation. Of course, the kind of mediation suggested by labour in thisgeneric sense is radically different from the abstract labour characterising

capitalism. Labour, in the sense in which Marx discussed it above, does not

reduce the totality of social relations to the operation of a singular principle;

it does not dissolve contingency and difference into a universal kind of activity.

Rather, labour as the metabolic interaction between man and nature mediates

between discrete opposites, which retain their independence and contingency.

Postone, however, repeatedly equates the value-form of mediation withmediation itself. He conflates first- and second-order mediations. The root of

the problem, I contend, lies in his tendency to read Hegelian categories

exclusively in terms of the logic of capital. It is as if Postone thinks that

mediation in Hegel forever involves the exclusion of difference, the reduction

of contingency to singularity, and the subsumption of particularity by abstract

universality. He would do well to consider the implications of Hegels critique

of Spinoza:


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38 Hegel 1991, p. 226.39 Postone 1993, p. 291.40 Postone 1993, p. 293.

Substance . . . without preceding dialectical mediation . . . is only the dark,

shapeless abyss, so to speak, in which all determinate content is swallowed

up as radically null and void, and which produces nothing out of itself that

has a positive subsistence of its own.38

Beyond capital

Postones claim that the logic of Marxs analysis argues against posing the

proletariat or humanity as subject is not supportable by Marxs own texts.

Unfortunately, this limitation can easily obscure the importance of other

aspects of his book. It contains an especially rich discussion of the centralcontradiction of capitalism: the drive to increase material wealth vs. the drive

to augment value.

Postone shows that

[A]lthough a change in socially general productivity does not change the

total amount of value produced per abstract time unit, it does change the

determination of this time unit. The continuous redetermination of socially

necessary labor time creates a treadmill effect: the drive of capital to

accumulate constantly in order to exist. Becoming is the condition of its

being.39

Because each new level of productivity is redetermined as a new base level,

this dynamic tends to become ongoing and is marked by ever-increasing

levels of productivity.40

Yet capitals effort to reduce socially necessary labour time to a minimumconstantly runs up against the fact that living labour remains its only source

of value.

A growing disparity arises between developments in the productive power

of labor (which are not necessarily bound to the direct labor of the workers),

on the one hand, and the value frame within which such developments are

expressed (which is bound to such labor), on the other. The disparity between

the accumulation of historical time and the objectification of immediate labor

time becomes more pronounced as scientific knowledge is increasingly


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166 Peter Hudis

41 Postone 1993, p. 297.42 Postone 1993, p. 224.

materialized in production . . . a growing disparity separates the conditions

for the production of material wealth from those for the generation of value.41

The result is a shearing pressure which renders the system unstable and

internally contradictory.Postones discussion of the double dimensionality of capital is of special

importance in light of post-Seattle developments. It helps focus radical critique

on the true problem, that is, the contradiction between the drive to increase

material wealth vs. the drive to augment value, instead of on subsidiary issues

such as corporate greed or the lack of democratic control over corporate

decisions. His discussion of how capital posits the material conditions for

a higher form of society, through the achievement of vastly increasedmaterial productivity and the reduction of necessary labour time to a bare

minimum, mitigates against romantic critiques of capitalism which look

towards a nostalgic return to an idyllic past or which ignore the possibility

of freely appropriating in the future that which is currently constituted in an

alienating form.

Yet, by separating the contradiction of material form vs. value-form from

the actual class struggles at the point of production and elsewhere, Postoneleaves us with little sense of how to close the gap between is and ought,

especially since, as he emphasises, there is no reason to presume any automatic

collapse of capitalism. He says that it has become superfluous to appeal to

a living human agent to uproot the system, since capitalism is less and less

dependent on human labour at the point of production and more dependent

on socially constituted knowledge and practices that do not involve the

productive labourer. He fails to mention that such knowledge and practicesare more and more falling under the sway of commodified relations which

characterise the traditional factory. This helps explain why many who are not

directly involved in the production of surplus-value, from telephone operators

to Boeings engineers, are showing increased labour militancy. This is also

true of those with no direct relation to the production process, like the

permanent army of the unemployed, which rose up in Los Angeles in 1992.

Though none of these have Postones ear, he does write, overcoming thehistorical Subject, that is, capital, would allow people, for the first time, to

become the subjects of their own liberation.42 Even Postone, for all his hostility


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to the notion of masses as subject, finds it necessary to speak of liberation in

terms of becoming subjects of our own liberation. This is quite proper, for

it is not possible to consistently posit a standpoint of liberation without

affirming subjective self-development. Yet, by refusing to identify humansubjects in the present which can help realise such a future possibility, it

becomes hard to see how capital can actually be overcome. Simply positing

dead labor as the emancipatory alternative by pointing to the shearing

pressure can hardly suffice so long as the notion of an automatic collapse of

capitalism is ruled out of consideration.

Thus, despite Postones efforts to trace out the trajectory of capital in a

way that presents the possibilities of the future as immanent in the forms ofself-movement in the present, we are left with a sort of Kantian dualism

between what is and what could be, short of an immanent principle that

could reconcile them.

The originality of Postones book does not lie in its opposition to the notion

of the proletariat as subject of revolt. That attitude was endemic to the New

Left and gained a wider following with the tidal wave of postmodernism.

What is original with Postone is his effort to argue that Marxs value-theoreticalcategories show that Marx did not consider the working class as subject. His

book can be seen as an effort to re-interpret Marx on the basis of a specific

attitude toward the working class held by a large section of the generation

of 1968; it can also be seen as an effort to account for the postmodernist notion

of the death of the subject without succumbing to its pessimism and nihilism.

Yet is precisely these attitudes, I would argue, which are becoming increasingly

anachronistic. No one today is reaching for a universal subject, be it theproletariat or anyone else, before which all should genuflect. The notion of

a singular subject, or reducing all social struggles to the proletariat, belongs

to a historical period which is behind us and which will not return. But the

present moment does not disclose a rejection of proletarian subjectivity per

se. On the contrary, many of the protests since Seattle be they campus

protests against sweatshops or new strikes at the workplace centre on

conditions of labour and the struggles against alienation in the workplace.Quite unlike the 1960s New Left, the Seattle generation has sought to forge

a unity between workers and students that was unimaginable, at least in the

US, for decades.

Just as much of the Traditional Marxism criticised by Postone has an

antiquated ring to it due to its exaggerated focus on property relations and


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168 Peter Hudis

its posing of proletarian labour as the principle of a new society, so too, in

light of the present, does Postones very critique of it. Seattle suggests that

we may be nearing the end of the long night of the denigration of the subject

in Western radicalism. It may not be too early for theory to take notice, byproclaiming the death of death of the subject.

References

Anderson, Kevin 1993, The Unknown Marxs Capital, Vol. I: The French Edition of187275, 100 Years Later, Review of Radical Political Economics, 15, 4: 7180.

Appadurai, Arjun 1978, The Substance of Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dunayevskaya, Raya 1989a, The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism, Chicago:News and Letters.

Dunayevskaya, Raya 1989b, Philosophy and Revolution, from Hegel to Sartre and fromMarx to Mao, New York: Columbia University Press.

Dunayevskaya Raya 2000 [1958],Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 Until Today, Amherst:Humanity Books.

Hegel, Georg W.F. 1979, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, Albany:SUNY Press.

Hegel, Georg W.F. 1929, Science of Logic, Volume II, translated by Johnston and Struthers,New York: Macmillan.

Hegel, Georg W.F. 1991, The Encyclopedia Logic, translated by T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting,and H.S. Harris, Indianapolis: Hackett Press.

Hudis, Peter 1995, Labor, High Tech Capitalism, and the Crisis of the Subject: ACritique of Recent Developments in Critical Theory, Humanity & Society, 19, 4,November: 420.

Marcuse, Herbert 1960, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Boston:Beacon Press.

Marx, Karl 1975, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Collected Works,Volume 3, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1977, Capital, Volume I, translated by Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage.

Marx, Karl 1981, Kreuznach Notebooks, in Exzerpte und Notiz en 1843 bis Januar1845, Gesamtausgabe, IV:2, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Marx, Karl 1989, Le Capital, Paris 187275, in Gesamtausgabe II:7, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Postone, Moishe 1993, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of MarxsCritical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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The Death of the Death of the Subject by Peter Hudis